Ustream

Richard Shweder, "The Meta-Physical Realities of the Un-Physical Sciences; And Why Vertical Integration Seems So Unreal (and Unsavory) to Ontological Pluralists" :

Reality testing is unavoidably grounded on metaphysical assumptions. Among reflective reality testers a rather un-conciliatory clash of metaphysical traditions has been going on for a very long time; perhaps for 2500 years So it is not at all surprising that the contemporary state of the art in the human sciences is in fact not all that different from what it was in 1913 when Emile Durkheim presented his paper on "The Religious Problem and the Duality of Nature" to the Societe de Philosophie in Paris, summarizing his famous book "The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life." As noted by Durkheim's intellectual biographer Stephen Lukes, alluding to the apparent dualisms and un-conciliatory oppositions that were up for discussion at Durkheim's lecture (dualisms such the physical versus the mental, the body versus the soul, sense experience versus conceptual thought, the profane versus the sacred): "Philosophers had no genuine solution: empiricists, materialists and utilitarians, on the one hand, and absolute idealists on the other, simply denied these antinomies without accounting for them; ontological dualists simply reaffirmed them without explaining them." One suspects that is pretty much the way it has always been and still is today, despite the ecumenical "good news" from those in the academy who advocate unity of knowledge, who fancy "theory-of-everything" notions or who believe that ultimately "it all comes down to [this or that]". In my talk I will try to explain (in the non-reductive sense of explicating the good reasons for believing something) why ontological dualists, including Descartes and Karl Popper, care to affirm such oppositions; and why ontological pluralists in general worry that vertical integration is a form of destructive integrity in which several orders of reality (the everyda ...